[Gravyness]

What kind of economic revolution will happen as that statistics approaches 100% for every good, not just grain?

Because eventually "work" will be so unnecessary we will need to redistribute money to people who have nothing to do and now that I put that into words I have realized that is already happening at my country, nevermind.

[zaroth]

Not sure why this is downvoted. The preeminent economists of the age thought that this is exactly what would happen - everyone would be working 2-4 hours a week and there would be nothing left to be done because every hour would be so damn productive.

The problem is twofold. First, there’s a lot of people in the world and bringing them out of poverty increases the economy up to 3 orders of magnitude, e.g. from living on $0.25 a day to living on $250 a day, which can suck up a whole lot of productivity gains.

And secondly, as it turns out, there’s always new places to shift demand when less and less of your budget is required just to subsist.

And then when all those “beyond sustenance” dollars all start chasing the same limited supply of goods, say, a house in the Bay Area, or even a lobster dinner…

[treeman79]

If your willing to live by 1800 quality of life then 5 hours a week at minimum wage will be plenty of money. Sack of beans and grain. Few yards of cloth.

Land is the only limiter. Even that is cheap if your willing to live in middle of no where.

[hackernewds]

Exactly. We are already there to subsist on basic human needs for food and shelter on < 10 hours work per week. But the human need to keep uplifting our lives will ensure we're always in the rat race desiring to settle in California or Hawaii

[chii]

which is fine i think - the rat race is what got us to today's huge material wealth and comforts.

[benj111]

You could make the case that we're already at that point. The system is being propped up by our ability to buy ever more stuff. Ever more people are employed in the service economy. Ie relatively low skilled but not easily automated work.

For me this is the main point of basic income. If you get to the point where people can't consume enough stuff to keep everyone employed, you end up with a situation with the class that own the means of production not having anyone to sell to, because 'the workers' don't have any income.

[sparker72678]

Then we can spend all day being chased by ads intended to bolster our discontentment and persuade us to purchase products and services we don't need.

[perrygeo]

The need for "work" is still absolutely necessary in the physical sense. All we've done is replace human/animal labor with cheap fossil fuels. The only way it could appear efficient is with dishonest accounting - intentionally ignoring the physical basis of energy production and assuming watts are infinitely cheap and substitutable.

[Cpoll]

That sounds like The Matrix (the movie) logic. In reality, feeding humans is energy inefficient. If anything, it takes multiple watts to end up with one watt of human work. Dishonest accounting is pretending human/animal labor is free.